Asus launched an impressive budget smartphone, the Zenfone Max Pro in India in April. The company is also expected to launch the Asus Zenfone 5Z which it unveiled at MWC 2018. However, before a flagship smartphone launch, the company has unveiled its first-ever Android Go smartphone, the Zenfone Live L1. Asus has launched the new smartphone in Indonesia for a price of around IDR 1.5 million (Rs 7200 approx.).

The Asus Zenfone Live L1 is an entry-level Android Go device that has a 5.45 inch display with a 1440 x 720 px resolution.

Under the hood, the smartphone runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 chipset paired with 1GB of RAM and 16GB onboard storage. The onboard storage can be expanded using a microSD card slot. The smartphone runs on Android 8.1 Oreo (Go Edition) out of the box. Asus has also launched a 2GB RAM variant of the smartphone which runs Android 8 Oreo with ZenUI 5.0 on top.

Powering the smartphone is a 3000 mAh battery which charges via a micro USB port. To the back of the smartphone is a 13MP camera with an LED flash while the front of the device houses a 5MP camera.

About Android Go

At the Google I/O event in May 2017, Google promised to launch a custom version of Android tailor-made for lower-end devices. On the 5th of December, Android Go (Oreo edition) was officially launched and made available to smartphone manufacturers and developers.

The idea behind Android Go is for Google to create a version of Android OS which is designed to run better on phones with either 512MB or 1GB of RAM. In the world of OnePlus 5T with its 8GB of RAM or Galaxy Note8’s 6GB RAM, it is easy to forget that there are lower-end smartphones currently available in the market which have 1GB of RAM or less.

Google has claimed that Android Go’s Oreo edition will be a variant of Android Oreo that a manufacturer can just set by ticking off a configuration flag. What this basically does is that it sets up the phone to use the “Go” versions of a handful of Google apps such as the main Google app, Google Assistant, Google Maps, Gmail, and others. Google claims that the smaller apps and slimmer OS can as much as halve the amount of storage that’s taken up by default on a new phone running default OS.

For an entry-level Android Go device, the Zenfone Live L1 has impressive specifications, especially when compared to the likes of the Nokia 1, another Android Go device. However, the Zenfone Live doe snot have a fingerprint sensor which is a norm for a 2018 a smartphone. There are no details about the smartphone’s launch in India as of now.

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